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http://www.nypress.com/col1.cfm?content_id=163
Now, I can deal with people not liking "BWP", but if this man's review was any more incoherent, I'd say he was a mental patient. Read it and tell me how far you get... I got to his nattering on about the logical inconsistancies within the film before I gave up and collapsed in a heap.
Let's see - his problem with the film is that it is a pseudo-documentary, and he hates pseudo-documentaries (This is Spinal Tap, Man Bites Dog, Dadetown) unless they're within a movie (Hi Mom!) because they are not technically well crafted. I guess he doesn't own a videocamera. He then had to say this through 14 paragraphs.
I also think that anyone who thought that I Stand Alone was badly acted knows little about acting.
Oh, and he hates Gen Xers (yet references Nirvana). He's just another anti-hype poser.
The Blair Witch Project
directed by Daniel Myrick & Eduardo
Sanchez
A Cinematic Wedgie
"Kill it before it grows!" Bob Marley sang. I’m cringing at the puerile
celebration of The Blair Witch Project. This home video by the
Florida-based team Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez is the worst of this
year’s movie offenses so far. Calling it a "movie" is a bothersome
technicality (it’s been transferred to celluloid and is being exhibited
as film,
okay?). But its Unsolved Mysteries premise—pretend footage left behind
from a search for the occult—makes a mess of what used to be known as
basic film grammar. If cinema has a language, a vocabulary, an alphabet,
this is nonsense. And so, of course, this "project" is being acclaimed
as an
esthetic breakthrough. Project? Oh, for the sanity of looking at movies
as
movies.
Evidently a terrible thing has happened in film culture. While the rest
of the
world was sleeping, pseudo-postmodernism has taken over the souls of
festival coordinators, film critics and a whole generation of media brats.
In
the desperation to claim something of their own, the makers of BWP have
ignored movie history, including such point-of-view experiments as
Intolerance, Sunset Boulevard, Chelsea Girls, Made in the U.S.A. They
assert primitivism as an innovation. But this story of three college-age
film
buffs—Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard (playing
themselves)—making a documentary about a (fake) local legend in the
Maryland woods hasn’t got the rigorous plainness of films that luxuriate
in
the rough surfaces and genuine perplexity of real life like Ira Sachs’
The
Delta, a Ross McElwee documentary or just about any Iranian film you care
to name (especially Makhmalbaf’s Salaam Cinema). In old-fashioned
huckster tradition, Myrick and Sanchez flaunt their oafishness as sleek,
modern news. (They’ve already extended their inanity to an Internet
website, making this an ultimate example of the pathetic 90s need to be
deluded.) Only dishonest or hopelessly ignorant people will go along with
this charade.
Unable to question issues of faith or ideology in the terms of a Reinhold
Neibuhr or imagery of a John Boorman, Myrick and Sanchez proceed with
lo-fi self-assurance that could only result from combined naivete and
arrogance. Their horror film is based in idiot savantry; the schlock gimmicks
of excitation (spooky noises, unseen threats) only a moron would want to
claim as original. If it’s not a generational trend, it’s an essential
fault of this
uninformed era. Based on disrespect for the cultural past, or for logic,
BWP
flatters today’s indie-film audience with the soggy nonsense that their
lack
of skill, preparedness and imagination—their lack of skepticism—can
suitably entertain others. The foolishness of every badly acted, facetiously
written, poorly photographed film you’ve suffered for the past 20 years
(Laws
of Gravity; Man Bites Dog; Clean, Shaven; Henry Fool; L’Eau Froide; I
Stand Alone) culminates in BWP’s basic premise: Its supposedly lost
footage enshrines the work habits of rank amateurs.
For all Myrick and Sanchez’s appeal to contemporary film enthusiasts,
their movie requires an astounding suspension of disbelief—gullibility
strained to the point of stupidity. Don’t ask how the team’s battery pack
for
lights and camera lasts so long. Don’t ask who’s holding the camera at
any
given moment of threesome crisis. Or who’s turning it on—even when it’s
simply pointed down at the ground (80 percent of the imagery is shaky
cam footage of leaves, rocks, branches). What’s outside the frame
is not
intimidating when what’s inside is insipid. Myrick and Sanchez want
audiences to condone their cosseted notion of youthful inquiry, even
though—as Heather, Michael and Joshua are portrayed—it’s nothing
more than a badly planned career gesture.
Abjectly humorless, Myrick and Sanchez take horror movie cliches to heart.
Their film (like its Internet offshoot) fulfills a post-70s idea of movies
as private fantasy rather
than social or cultural tool. Myrick and Sanchez fetishize the careers
of
such quasi-professional, up-from-the-ranks film geeks as Robert Rodriquez,
Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. Eager to join that league, their horror
tale indulges wannabe-ism. The scariest thing about the film is its insistent
(implicit) indulgence of trustfund filmmaking. The Me-Too Project. Their
trio
goes to the woods not for the perfectly good horny-teen reasons in Friday
the 13th or like the unsuspecting cemetery visitors in Night of the Living
Dead. They’re really longing to go Hollywood or bust. First bust, Maryland;
second bust, your pocket. The proof—as always—is in the filmmakers’
moment of truth: Heather, lost, wet, frightened, humiliated, gets the camera
turned on her by an angry teammate berating her ambition. Her
competence and her moviemaking dreams attacked, Heather blubbers,
"Please, it’s all I have left."
To hell with Heather’s illusions—and Myrick and Sanchez’s. Art requires
honesty and a movie like this further requires the discipline, talent and
craft
to sustain a conceptual conceit. There have been many beautiful ones in
the history of cinema—Blood of a Poet, L’Age D’Or, Citizen Kane, Singin’
in
the Rain, Last Year at Marienbad, M*A*S*H, Killer of Sheep, Gertrud,
Excalibur and many others, high and low. But it’s not likely that Myrick
and
Sanchez have seen them or that they (or their enablers in the media) have
learned anything from those films. BWP simply wants in on the blockbuster
game; it’s a low-rent version of Die Hard, Speed, Titanic disguising its
corruption in rags.
Here is the slippery slope. When critics support tripe like BWP it’s one
of
the little digs at civility, sophistication, truth, that kill movie culture
by
approving and ratifying silly concepts and technical ineptitude. Middle-aged
critics do it in order to seem hip or, simply, wishing their fatuousness
to be
accepted. I’ll bet none of the critics praising BWP have seen Joel DeMott’s
superb 1980 Demon Lover Diary—not a faux documentary but an insightful
look at the culture of pop transgression and the working-class ambitions
it
cloaks. BWP hype proves audiences are more dupable than ever. You think
you’re losing your mind when nonsense like this is praised. As a friend
said, "If it’s on the cover of the Village Voice it must be bullshit."
The
critical laxity, the esthetic slovenliness, the moral dishonesty of praising
BWP typifies why today’s film culture is in the toilet. These mundane acts
of chicanery eventually, down the line, produce even worse movies and
dumber audiences.
Periodically, there’s some artifact that should get b.s. detectors clicking
but that imbeciles (and hypocrites) attempt to foist upon the public as
profound (The Truman Show, Leaving Las Vegas, anything by Neil LaBute).
But BWP signifies a special millennial variety of con. Along with a debased
notion of suspended disbelief, BWP is selling sham esthetics—distorting
cinematic realism as a metaphysical conundrum. Hear the carny barker:
We got ya John Carpenter wannabes here! We got ya wet-behind-the-ears
cinephiles! We got ya scary-unknown life metaphor! We got ya
post-college-minimum-wage blues! We got ya student loan ghosts!
Today’s youth movie market (including adult professionals who keep their
jobs by catering to demographic naivete) has been so pleased, teased and
congratulated of late that they’ve probably never felt the irritation of
a
cinematic wedgie. That’s all BWP is and the skepticism that rises up one’s
craw ought to make viewers angry. Yet, a hundred years into moviegoing,
audiences no longer have the confidence to cry "foul!" even as Myrick and
Sanchez pretend to be making a documentary using actors who don’t know
how to improvise (or keep a straight face); a cinematographer who never
varies compositions in monotonous locations; an editor who fudges
continuity.
Until BWP, I had thought the most useless drivel presented onscreen this
decade was Dadetown, a completely non credible pseudo-documentary that
some grownup film critics willingly swallowed. They took its snide ridicule
of
small-town downsizing as a serious representation of modern American
crisis. BWP continues that idiocy, using the horror movie form to suggest
levity yet seeking acclaim and serious regard. If Myrick and Sanchez want
to pull the wool over the modern audience’s eyes, they lack the
showmanship of Orson Welles’ Martian attack for 1930s radio and the
political purpose of Brian De Palma’s "Be Black Baby" sequence in Hi,
Mom!, a two-pronged satire of late-60s political zeal and media
presumption. Those landmarks of sophistication were, themselves, tributes
by Welles and De Palma to their audiences’ intelligence. The camera
placement and editing in Hi, Mom! shifted point of view from tv-network
style, to home-movie style, to revolutionary live-theater style. De Palma
kept illusions aloft, then deflated them to reveal how our ideas about
media
were tied to political sanctimony and credulity. The most Myrick and
Sanchez reveal is how happily unsophisticated contemporary moviegoers
have become.
It’s like they never read Nathaniel Hawthorne but got their notions of
fear
and anxiety from the trivial concerns of indie success. That’s why the
expedition is headed by a female: to mulct p.c. fashion. That’s why the
title
object remains unspecified, to avoid the complications of naming one’s
fear
or confronting the reality of dread. The film’s deliberate lack of closure
(its
refusal of authorship) is actually an act of denial and shucked
responsibility—anathema following Hawthorne’s evocation of the early
American psyche and what De Palma and Godard usefully illustrated about
modernist philosophical superstitions.
In the remarkable 1947 melodrama The Red House, Edward G. Robinson
warned a trio of high-schoolers to stay out of the woods and away from
the
"haunted" mansion at its heart. It was clear from the way director Delmer
Daves weighted the teens’ curiosity and hoked up their adventures twixt
quicksand and threatening tree branches that they were approaching
dangerous enlightenment, the prohibitive cultural aura around sex.
Trepidation in The Red House was both highly wrought and compelling
because it defined the characters’ prelapsarian lives. The Red House was
better on superstition by virtue of examining its cultural and psychological
roots. BWP is merely a blueprint for mindless moviemaking as the
prerogative of a nonthinking generation.
Heroizing—indeed, martyring—their yokel protagonists, Myrick and
Sanchez flatter a careless, maladroit movie culture. Heather, Michael and
Joshua are to filmmaking what the fake-rockers of Spinal Tap are to
Nirvana. (And think how many people still refer to Spinal Tap as genuine.)
All that’s genuine in BWP is ineptitude. Don’t just blame this on film
schools but on the failed influence of the Boy Scouts of America. The three
morons get lost in the woods because they can’t create a trail, build a
fire
or follow a river. Unable to read a map (they lose it), or a compass (they
keep it but don’t use it) or a book (Heather buys a how-to but never reads
it), they’re utterly hopeless. It’s meant to inspire fear and pity but
impatience wins. A movie this fatuous creates such silly and inconsistent
contexts; it makes you think bad thoughts like: Never go camping with
girls, never believe the buzz at Sundance or never trust any filmmaker
under
30.
As the revelatory Election dies on the vine, BWP is being feted as
zeitgeist-movie-of-the-month. Its dumbfounding praise will haunt us. After
this, filmmakers nursing original, sensible projects won’t even get the
encouragement to dare.